Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Never- theless,Jumblatt said, 'We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Leb- anon is Syria-and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian .. " OpposItIon. There is evidence that the Adminis- tration's redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syr- ian National Salvation Front is a coali- tion of opposition groups whose prin- cipal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice- President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high- ranking C.I.A. officer told me, "The Americans have provided both politi- cal and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial sup- port, but there is American involve- ment." He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowl- edge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front's members met with officials from the National Secu- rity Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents. Jumblatt said he understood that the issue was a sensitive one for the White House. "I told Cheney that some people in the Arab world, mainly the Egyp- tians"-whose moderate Sunni leader- ship has been fighting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for decades- "won't like it if the United States helps the Brotherhood. But if you don't take on Syria we will be face to face in Leba- non with Hezbollah in a long fight, and one we might not win." THE SHEIKH O n a warm, clear night early last December, in a bombed-out sub- urb a few miles south of downtown Bei- rut, I got a preview of how the Admin- istration's new strategy might play out in Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who has been in hid- ing, had agreed to an interview. Secu- rity arrangements for the meeting were secretive and elaborate. I was driven, in the back seat of a darkened car, to a damaged underground garage some- where in Beirut, searched with a hand- held scanner, placed in a second car to be driven to yet another bomb-scarred un- derground garage, and transferred again. Last summer, it was reported that Israel was trying to kill Nasrallah, but the ex- traordinary precautions were not due only to that threat. N asrallah' s aides told me that they believe he is a prime target of fellow-Arabs, primarily Jordanian in- telligence operatives, as well as Sunni ji- hadists who they believe are affiliated with AI Qgeda. (The government con- sultant and a retired four-star general said that Jordanian intelligence, with support from the U.S. and Israel, had been trying to infiltrate Shiite groups, to work against Hezbollah. Jordan's King Abdullah II has warned that a Shiite government in Iraq that was close to Iran would lead to the emergence of a Shiite crescent.) This is something of an ironic turn: Nasrallah's battle with Israel last summer turned him-a Shiite-into the most popular and influential figure among Sunnis and Shiites throughout the region. In recent months, however, he has increasingly been seen by many Sunnis not as a symbol of Arab unity but as a participant in a sectarian war. N asrallah, dressed, as usual, in reli- gious garb, was waiting for me in an unremarkable apartment. One of his advisers said that he was not likely to re- main there overnight; he has been on the move since his decision, last July, to order the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid set off the thirty-three-daywar. Nasrallah has since said publicly-and repeated to me-that he misjudged the Israeli re- sponse. 'We just wanted to capture pris- oners for exchange purposes," he told me. 'We never wanted to drag the re- .. " gIon Into war. Nasrallah accused the Bush Admin- istration of working with Israel to delib- erately instigate fitna, an Arabic word / I I / that is used to mean "insurrection and fragmentation within Islam." "In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other," he said. "I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence." (He did not provide any specific evi- dence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Leba- non. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations in- creased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.) Nasrallah said he believed that Pres- ident Bush's goal was "the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war-there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achiev- ing three Iraqi parts, which will be sec- tarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite." He went on, "I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, 'I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.' " N asrallah said he believed that Amer- ica also wanted to bring about the parti- tion of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country "into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq." In Lebanon, "There will be a Sunni state, an AIawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state." But, he said, "I do not know if there will be a Shiite state." N asrallah told me that he sus- pected that one aim of the Israeli bomb- ing of Lebanon last summer was "the destruction of Shiite areas and the dis- placement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq," which is dominated by Shiites. "I am not sure, but I smell this," he told me. Parti tion would leave Israel sur- THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 5, 2007 63